Mario & Luigi Brothership developer wanted an ‘edgier’ Mario but Nintendo said no
“We’d unleashed Acquire into the wild, only to go chasing after them again”
Acquire, the studio behind Mario & Luigi: Brothership, says it originally wanted to give Mario an edgier look but Nintendo wasn’t convinced.
In a new Ask the Developer interview on the official Nintendo website, Acquire designer Hitomi Furuta explained how she had originally designed Mario to look different to how he had in the past, but that Nintendo suggested it wouldn’t fit the art style of the previous Mario & Luigi games.
“Our challenge was to develop 3D visuals that would bring out the unique appeal of the Mario & Luigi series and differentiate it from other Mario games,” Furuta said. “I’m ashamed to say it, but we weren’t conscious of that when development started, which led to us making a huge detour.
“And in our search for a new Mario & Luigi style, at one point we ended up trying to present an edgier, more rugged Mario instead,” she laughed. “Then we received feedback from Nintendo that we should aim to make the art direction identifiable by fans as belonging to the Mario & Luigi series.
“After that, we were able to narrow down our focus to how we could combine two things: the appeal of illustrations featuring, for example, solid outlines and bold, black eyes, and the charm of pixel animations depicting the two characters moving around comically in all directions. I think that’s when we finally started to develop an art style that’s unique to this game.”
Nintendo producer Akira Otani added that from Nintendo’s point of view, Acquire’s character designs didn’t feel like Mario and instead “gave the impression of something different that just resembled Mario, so we called for a meeting in order to reassess the direction”.
“While we wanted Acquire to have their own unique style, we also wanted them to preserve what defines Mario,” he explained. “I think it was a period when we were experimenting with how those two things could coexist.”
At the meeting, Nintendo showed Acquire’s designers a document describing what defines the protagonists in the Mario & Luigi series.
“Although we’d enthusiastically pitched this rugged version of Mario, when I considered it from a player’s perspective, I started to worry about whether it really represented the Mario that players would want to play,” Furuta recalled.
“So, when we got that clear direction from Nintendo, it made perfect sense to us. I think that’s when we realised for the first time, ‘ah, this is what we should be aiming for this time in terms of a 3D visual style from Acquire’, and were able to establish the fundamental direction.”
Further reading
Review: Mario & Luigi Brothership is a triumphant return for the series
Haruyuki Ohashi, the game’s director at Acquire, added: “We had a strong desire to experiment with new visual styles, but [Nintendo] articulated their vision to us each time in a way that we found convincing.”
“Yeah,” Nintendo’s Otani laughed. “It’s like we’d unleashed Acquire into the wild, only to go chasing after them again.”
VGC’s Mario & Luigi: Brothership review calls the game “a triumphant return for the series, maintaining the spirit and action-oriented platforming of its predecessors, coupled with fantastic exploration and satisfying battle mechanics.”
